The Truth & Consequences of Sequestration

What if someone told you that a disastrous event was looming; one that will play havoc with economy, and bring pain and hardship to millions? What if the same someone told you that our government set this disaster in motion, and could easily stop it, but appears unable or unwilling to do so? You’d call them crazy, right?

Well, welcome to the insanity called “sequestration.” Here’s why and how it will trickle down into your life. Here’s the truth and consequences of sequestration.

The Truth

“There’s three sides,” the saying goes, “to every story: yours, mine, and the truth.” Let’s start with the truth about the sequester

As the sequestration clock runs out, Washington is shifting its from playing the “Blame Game” to figuring out how to put the brakes on Washington’s latest custom-made crisis. Both sides, the White House and the GOP, have their reasons for the shift.

No wonder Republicans don’t like what Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R. Calif.) called the president’s “Road Show.” calling attention to the impact of sequestration’s automatic cuts and the roadblock the GOP’s intransigence to increasing revenue.

While both sides indeed have pressing reasons to turn from pointing fingers to pointing a way out of the mess we’re in, there’s another big reason for opting out of the “Blame Game.” If Americans look too closely into the story of how we got into this mess, neither Republicans nor Democrats come out smelling like roses.

“Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan,” the old proverb goes. The sequester is one of the biggest examples of Washington’s failure to address the crises facing the country, but it is not an orphan. This failure has more fathers than even a “Maury Povich Show”paternity test could begin to sort out.

The 2011 debt ceiling debacle led to the passage of The Budget Control Act of 2011, which established a bipartisan “super committee” tasked with coming up with $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction measures. According to Bob Woodward’s book, The Price of Politics, the idea for sequestration originated in the White House, when Chief of Staff Jack Lew and advisor Jim Nabors brought the idea to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in the midst of the debt ceiling debate, as a means of avoiding default while leaving the door open to cuts later on. Ultimately, the sequester became part of the dastardly debt ceiling deal.

So, the concept of sequestration began with the White House. But that doesn’t get us all the way to where we are today, just days away from suffering a major, self-inflicted economic wound. If the Obama administration gave birth to this bad idea, Republicans nursed it, fed it, gave it legs, and taught it to run.

Now, Congress, back in 2011, also passed a law saying that if both parties couldn’t agree on a plan to reach that $4 trillion goal, about a trillion dollars of additional, arbitrary budget cuts would start to take effect this year. And by the way, the whole design of these arbitrary cuts was to make them so unattractive and unappealing that Democrats and Republicans would actually get together and find a good compromise of sensible cuts as well as closing tax loopholes and so forth. And so this was all designed to say we can’t do these bad cuts; let’s do something smarter. That was the whole point of this so-called sequestration.

Unfortunately, Congress didn’t compromise. They haven’t come together and done their jobs, and so as a consequence, we’ve got these automatic, brutal spending cuts that kicked in on Friday. The sequestration cuts were designed to be so incredibly stupid, painful, and dangerous that lawmakers would be forced to come to some kind of agreement in order to avoid them. Unfortunately, that’s not how it went down.

Thanks to Republicans, the “super committee” was pretty much guaranteed to fail.

It documents the sad reality of both the Democrats’ willingness to bend over backwards — even offering to sweeten the deal with cuts to Social Security and Medicare — and Republicans’ refusal to even consider any deal that increased taxes on the wealthy. The result was the failure of the “super committee” and the birth of the sequester.

[P]ointing out Republican-caused harms to millions of people — many of them Republicans — does not sway the ultra-right. Why? Democratic pundits say that Republicans want to hurt the president, to show government doesn’t work by making it not work, and to protect “special interests” from higher taxes. All true. But there is an additional and deeper reason. Ultra-conservatives believe that the sequester is moral, that it is the right thing to do.

Progressives tend to believe that democracy is based on citizens caring for their fellow citizens through what the government provides for all citizens — public infrastructure, public safety, public education, public health, publicly-sponsored research, public forms of recreation and culture, publicly-guaranteed safety nets for those who need them, and so on. In short, progressives believe that the private depends on the public, that without those public provisions Americans cannot be free to live reasonable lives and to thrive in private business. They believe that those who make more from public provisions should pay more to maintain them.

Ultra-conservatives don’t believe this. They believe that Democracy gives them the liberty to seek their own self-interests by exercising personal responsibility, without having responsibility for anyone else or anyone else having responsibility for them. They take this as a matter of morality. They see the social responsibility to provide for the common good as an immoral imposition on their liberty.

Their moral sense requires that they do all they can to make the government fail in providing for the common good. Their idea of liberty is maximal personal responsibility, which they see as maximal privatization — and profitization — of all that we do for each other together, jointly as a unified nation.

They also believe that if people are hurt by government failure, it is their own fault for being “on the take” instead of providing for themselves. People who depend on public provisions should suffer. They should have rely on themselves alone — learn personal responsibility, just as Romney said in his 47 percent speech. In the long run, they believe, the country will be better off if everyone has to depend on personal responsibility alone. Sequestration offers Republicans to potentially irresistible opportunities: the chance to bring President Obama down a peg or two, as well as a shot at implementing spending cuts that the majority of Americans have repeatedly rejecting at the polls. The consequences of those spending cuts doesn’t bother tea party conservatives in the least.

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